traversing the road to the rest of my life

Category

delusions

Because nothing says “I love you” like making someone wait/help 5 hours to have dinner at midnight. Yeah… that didn’t go quite as I envisioned it.

This coming saturday is Koby’s birthday. However, beginning last night (wednesday) and running through sunday afternoon, our congregation is holding a meeting (for you non Church of Christ folks, that means we have a guest preacher in town, and services every evening and twice a day weekends. Good stuff). We will be busy saturday, especially as Koby has made himself invaluable as the resident techie. As such, we decided to allocate the previous saturday for birthday spoiling.

We had an excessively lazy morning (seems neither of us had gotten enough sleep during the week) followed by an excursion to a rumored tea shop in the mall a bit North. We sampled some really tasty teas, and though expensive, the tins of tea we took home will be enjoyed for awhile to come. The names are about as complicated as a Starbucks coffee order, so I will ramble on about tea another time. By the time we got home with groceries for dinner, it was 7:00. And… as mentioned, dinner took 5 hours.

Double Crispy Honey Garlic Pork

Post to come.

Oven-Fried Onion Rings

Post to come.

Sweet Potato Fries

Post to come.

Parmesian Crumbled Asparagus

Post to come.

Moroccan Carrots

Post to come.

Apple Dumplings

Post to come.

Chocolate Molten Cake

Post to come.

You see, given the opportunity to cook for him, I raided my Pinterest boards and came up with… well… a lot. One entree, two vegetables, two appetizers, and two (abandoned) desserts, to be exact. In my defense, I expected to do one of the desserts on a separate nights, and the other was just a variation on an old favorite. I know, pretty weak defense, huh?

So… immediately upon returning home, I dove into cooking. He helped quite a bit, and claimed to enjoy most of it (including the helping.) Most of the food was decent, and there were few mishaps and even a few serendipity moments. However, he did make a very wise observation as we ate our very late dinner.

“Maybe next time, only one appetizer, and one new recipe at a time.” Yeah, perhaps that would be best.

I had plans to share my thrift store adventures, but alas, no. In the midst of the mundane, disaster has struck– an all too familiar disaster. Thinking myself nearly done with laundry (yes, I was doing laundry at 3am. Hush.) , I start laying out clothes in preparation for folding, and–egads, what is that?? First, why is there a white shirt in the colored load? And second, why are there cherry scented speckles scattered here and there? Yep. Tis true– chapstick in the laundry. Again.

After sighing and reflecting that at least there weren’t orange crayon splotches in addition –last time I’d washed a purse, and the lining had torn, secreting a crayon in it’s depths– I set about spraying each greasy little spot with stain remover and tossing it in again. Problem solved, I thought. Nope. Back to the interwebs for more wisdom because everyone online is either amazingly brilliant, or else exceedingly stupid. Usually, google cooperates in leading me to the former and weeding out the latter. Internet wisdom says rub with baking soda, THEN pre-treat, then wash. So… yep. We’ll see.

Worst case scenario, they’ll fade some over time. They aren’t ruined, just… unhappy. Still, the situation is not encouraging. I’m trying to maintain the illusion that when we are married, I will be this fountain of domestic magnificence, complete with the high heels and frilly apron– never mind that even now, I rarely wear heels. As mentioned before, I like my delusions. Things like this that threaten to upend them are not welcome.

At some point tomorrow, I’ll ask my fiance if he’s sure he still wants me, and he’ll say absolutely, even if he has to do all the laundry from here on out, because he’s just wonderful like that. (Can you tell we’ve had this conversation once or twice before?)

All the same, you’d think by now I could at least do laundry. I’ve only been doing it for half my life.

Update: He still loves me, and promised he would teach me to do laundry. Also, baking soda works, kinda. Some are more gone than others, but I suspect the ones that didn’t really work are the ones I didn’t grind in enough. Lesson learned– grind in the baking soda. (Okay, technically the lesson learned is check all pockets before doing laundry even if you are convinced there are no pockets to check because only like… 3 articles of normal clothing even HAVE pockets. But nevertheless, in case of chapstick stain, grind in baking soda.)